Lena Laki is an indie folk singer-songwriter based in London and her Debut EP Take Me With was released in April 2016.
Lena Laki has been playing music and performing live in Germany and in England for the last few years. Doing mainly jazz and folk covers at first, she quickly got to working on her own material and trying out some of her original compositions during her sets.
All of the five songs included in this EP have developed over time through various band formations, taking on different arrangements, in some cases even different lyrics. The product of countless daydreams, a few epiphanies and a lot of hard work, Take Me With is testament to Lena’s musical talent as much as to her artistic commitment.
Meeting with the writer Christoforos Diakoulakis was the most significant turning point in her journey. While he furnished some of her earlier songs with lyrics, Lena turned to some of his own poems to create new songs. What began as a creative partnership eventually turned into marriage, and the two of them moved to London in 2014, which proved to be the catalyst for Lena’s musical aspirations. Guitar in hand, she began gigging across various venues and slowly building a fanbase, while also joined by a number of select musicians who believed in her project. Everything had started to fall into place and it wasn’t long before she found herself in the studio.
Lena’s songs themselves capture that feeling of sweet surrender, melancholic and hopeful at once, as Lena’s warm, confident voice blends each time with the lamenting violin, and heartfelt melodies bring to life tales of eerie encounters and impossible separations.
Drawing from a wide range of influences, from Nick Drake and Nina Simone, to Radiohead and Goldfrapp, it is not easy to pin down Lena Laki’s musical style. Brave and original, haunting and instantly addictive, her Debut EP bears simultaneously that ageless quality of an old favourite and the inventiveness of that cool indie, folky album we pride ourselves on discovering first.
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